         
Piano Album VI
Four new Irish works commissioned for the 2009 AXA Dublin International Piano Competition are now available from CMC. Composers David Byers, Siobhán Cleary, Jennifer Walshe and Bill Whelan were commissioned with funding from RTÉ lyric fm to write the test pieces for the semi-final round of this year's competition. Each competitor who reached the semifinals chose one of the works to include in his or her programme in the National Concert Hall on 9 and 10 May. This year, as in previous years, the Contemporary Music Centre has collaborated with the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition by publishing the new works. Since 1988 a total of 26 new piano pieces have been written for the competition, and published and promoted by CMC. Many competitors keep the Irish pieces in their repertoire after the competition, so this is a very important worldwide promotion for Irish composition.
David Byers' piece A Full Moon takes its inspiration from the poem The Moon by Belfast poet Joseph Campbell and the moon's wondrous light and its strange powers. Based on the music of an elaborate melismatic Ambrosian chant, the work is dedicated to John O'Conor. Chaconne by Siobhán Cleary uses the stately baroque model as its basis. The decorative material that weaves around the ground bass becomes more elaborate as the piece progresses before ending with a simple, less-adored expression of the eight-bar theme. Jennifer Walshe's becher consists of a series of extremely short micro-quotations from a wide variety of well known piano pieces which are played in rapid succession without any pause. The effect is highly virtuosic as the player abruptly switches piece, key, meter and mood from quotation to quotation. The Currach by Bill Whelan is a piano arrangement of the first movement of a concerto for two violins, Inishlacken, named after an island off the Galway coast. The movement imagines a trip in a currach out to the island with the vigorous rowing paused in the middle to look back at the Twelve Pins mountains and the Connemara landscape. Copies of Piano Album VI published by the Contemporary Music Centre are available from our online Shop or direct from the Contemporary Music Centre, price €25.00 plus postage and packing. Tel. +353(0)1-673 1922, email shop@cmc.ie Posted: 8 June 2009
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